چکیده انگلیسی

This article illustrates how the legitimacy of pay and evaluation processes in teams affect the effectiveness of team-based incentive designs in organizational work teams. We present a theoretical model of the development of legitimacy in team-based incentive designs and propose that the development of legitimacy for both pay dispersion in teams (i.e., difference in allocations of incentives among team members) and for the use of interdependent evaluations of performance promote team effectiveness. Our model introduces a new perspective to theorize about the conditions under which team rewards are an effective incentive design.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Legitimacy has long been recognized as a fundamental social property affecting the behavior, structure, and stability of organizations and teams (Habermas, 1975 and Weber, 1968). Legitimacy operates through a process by which cultural accounts from a larger social framework within which a social entity is nested, for example a team reward system or an organizational structure, are construed to support and explain the existence of that social entity (Berger and Luckmann, 1966 and Berger et al., 1973). Legitimacy has been studied as a property of teams, power or authority structures, reward redistributions, and cultural practices (Berger and Luckmann, 1966 and Walker et al., 1986). Legitimacy is fundamentally the result of a multilevel process (i.e., legitimation) that involves inputs at the level of the broad encompassing social framework, at the level of the object of legitimacy (for example, the team for a team reward system), and at the more local level of actors who mediate the construction of reality that grants or undermines legitimacy (Ridgeway et al., 1998). We are concerned here with legitimacy as a property of team reward systems.
One aspect of organizational life that can impact the legitimacy of team rewards systems is the idea of organizational justice. Although distinct from legitimacy in several ways, this construct is also similar to particular aspects of legitimacy. In order to distinguish similarities and differences between the two constructs, we need to further elucidate the construct of organizational justice.
One dimension of organizational justice that may be related to legitimacy is distributive justice (Colquitt et al., 2001), theorizing of which can be traced back to Aristotle's description of an empirical distributive justice in which rewards were just if they were congruent with contributions. It was further developed in Adam's (1965) work on equity theory, which predicts that employees will evaluate distributive fairness by comparing the ratio of their own inputs and outcomes with some referent's ratio. When these comparisons are unequal, employees perceive their situations as unfair and are motivated to modify their inputs and outcomes, creating pressure for redistribution (Berger et al., 1972), changing their referent choices or perceptions, or quitting in order to maintain their self-concepts. Findings show that outcome distributions perceived to be unfair can lead to lower performance (Greenberg, 1986), reduced commitment (Chebat and Slysarczyk, 2005), or higher turnover and absenteeism (DeConinck and Stilwell, 2004). But nonexperimental investigation finds much less redistribution than do experiments (Bacharach and Baratz, 1970), and the effects of positive inequity do not appear to be as strong as those of negative inequity (Bloom, 1999 and Greenberg, 1986). An unfair distribution of outcomes creates pressure to redistribute (Berger et al., 1972). This is usually conceptualized as an auxiliary phenomenon to a variety of processes such as power, authority, political stability (Ridgeway and Berger, 1986), rewards (Adams, 1963 and Homans, 1961), and norm formation (Berger et al., 1972). This distinction is important as we consider legitimacy theory where the acceptance of an outcome as fair would fall under one of the dimensions of legitimacy defined by Zelditch (2006), which he explains as having a social dimension called “validity” and an individual dimension called “propriety.” Distributive justice would affect the propriety dimension in that those who saw the outcomes as unfair would not endorse the practices of the team as legitimate on that dimension.
Similarly, the idea of procedural justice (Leventhal, 1980) should map well on the legitimacy construct , which is more in line with the conceptualization of validity (Zelditch, 2006) in that something is seen as procedurally fair if the generally social conventions are upheld. That is, the individual has the opportunity to voice an opinion, there is opportunity to provide feedback, and the individual can impact the process. If these conditions are met, the social convention is that the process is fair.
Weber (1968) re-directed the issue of legitimacy in modern social science by stressing forms of organization that provide guidance for action emerging from perceptions of a legitimate order (Ruef and Scott, 1998 and Weber, 1968). Extensions of legitimacy in modern theory beyond power structures come from Parson's (1960) idea of the need to validate resource allocations through the consistency between the alignment of the criteria (i.e., use of resources) and societal values and/or functions. New institutionalism theories then advanced the notion of organizations as matching general cultural or normative models with their processes and structures in order to achieve legitimacy (Berger and Luckmann, 1966).
Legitimacy as an explanation for differences in pay in a team setting is important as a means of maintaining effort and motivation. Legitimacy is the silent partner in a number of explanations for organizational action. For example, justice theory relies on the two facets of legitimacy to explain behavior of individuals in organizations: both the validity and the propriety of a system (Zelditch, 2006). Validity refers to the acceptance of a set of social norms or normative processes, but does not include approval of them. Propriety refers to whether an individual approves of the norms (Zelditch, 2006). Therefore, propriety contains some measure of fairness, as individuals are less likely to approve of systems and norms that exclude fairness. Beginning with Adams (1965), notions of fairness for outcomes were based on legitimate differences in individual's contributions. If this standard is not met, the individual undertakes some action to remedy the injustice. Procedural justice is concerned with the process by which an outcome is determined (Leventhal, 1980). Providing a process that is free from bias is a method for the organization to obtain legitimacy for the outcomes that are then imposed on individuals.
Therefore, legitimacy differs from justice in some very important ways. First, justice does not exist without the perception that the outcome and process are fair (Colquitt et al., 2001). Legitimacy on the other hand can exist without fairness. Legitimacy is a construct that exists at both the team level, with the idea of validity, and at the individual level, with the idea of propriety (Zelditch, 2006). So while justice is concerned with the propriety level of legitimacy, true legitimacy goes even deeper and adds the team perceptions to individual perceptions.
We defined legitimacy earlier as a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions (Suchman, 1995). As such, it is important to discuss here a core set of ideas about the nature and effects of the collective (team, organization, societal) form of legitimacy that we apply in this paper. Legitimacy is dependent on consensus because it emerges from the acceptance by the team of the validity of an incentive program (Berger et al., 1972). The issue of the acceptance of validity affects team members' cognitions at the individual level. For example, research has shown that when subjects are responsible for deciding on the distribution of team earnings, their evaluations of justice (i.e., equality or equity) are significantly enhanced when exposed to experimentally manipulated validity. In this sense we can say legitimacy has a normative effect (Walker et al., 1991). Even more important, legitimacy affects behaviors at the team level. Legitimation is also instrumental in the sense that it exists as a socially accepted guide to behavior even for those who disagree (Ridgeway, 1989). Members of a team who may not be individually convinced about the fairness of a reward method will tend to accept team legitimacy as guidance for behavior. Moreover, legitimacy will support monitoring behavior, thus increasing the social demand for performance.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

Organizations and students of organizations are puzzled by the fact that organizations are becoming more thoroughly interconnected and yet more intricately partitioned. Technical and managerial knowledge has become ever more specific and differentiated over the past two decades, and organizations require concurrent effort of many diverse sets of employees to tackle increasing complexity. Thus, team-based work has become a priority of organizations and organizational researchers (Ilgen, 1999 and Rau, 2006). Moreover, these teams have extended their time horizons beyond constrained project durations, developing a need for self-actualization and sustainability over time.
Legitimacy of pay dispersion is important to the team as well as to the organization. Legitimacy provides the opportunity for the organization to institute a normative process for different reward structures. As Ashforth and Gibbs (1989) tell us, this legitimacy is a double-edged sword. The organization or team is afforded legitimacy through the consensus of the membership, but pursuit of legitimacy can make the organization seem manipulative and illegitimate. There is then a fine line to walk in the pursuit of legitimacy, especially when it comes to the outcomes that one receives from the organization.
Team incentives or rewards have been widely studied during the last three decades. However, most of the research focuses on individual drivers for team performance; the complexity of the collective mechanisms that may affect team rewards has seldom been examined. An important contribution of this model is the use of legitimation as a framework to contextualize the mechanisms by which team rewards affect outcomes at the team level and may help outline empirical strategies to close the gap that casts doubt about when, how, and to what degree dispersion in pay and incentives help or constrain collective performance. Legitimation provides an explanation of individual behaviors in the context of teams and addresses processes that predict behaviors, which may help integrate some conflicting results from previous research on team rewards. It addresses the DeMatteo et al. (1998) call to address the question of how and why rewards should affect team functioning and under what circumstances they will be most effective.
Interaction between the allocation and evaluation components of team rewards is not clearly specified and studied in most of the team rewards research, which may also be a reason for some of the variability in findings. The guidance that the explicit description of this interaction and of the team mechanisms that affect it may be another contribution that this model provides to future research on team rewards.
Designs of incentive programs for teams may benefit from considering both interdependence and the need for individual differentiation of team members. Looking at the reference structures available for team members may help define team membership and roles in a more effective way (Humphrey et al., 2009), provide an economic balance to the distribution of available resources, and guide implementation in terms of the need to (a) promote the salience of some specific referential structures and (b) explicitly manipulate social psychological distance in the team.
In summary, the current theorizing makes several contributions to the literature: (1) we enhanced research on team rewards and pay dispersion effects by integrating team-level theories of legitimacy and P–G fit in a predictive model of pay effectiveness, (2) we provided a generalizable model for analyzing team reward configurations across cultures and within the dynamics of team developments over time, and (3) we augmented the person–environment literature by modeling its possible contribution to the justice or legitimacy literature and therefore its additional value to models of team performance.